Festival Of Frugality

The Festival of Frugality is up at On Financial Success.
I really enjoyed the post from Uncommon Cents about how getting a new bike won’t make one a better cyclist. I have three siblings who are competitive cyclists, and regularly win races on bikes that cost a fraction of what many of their competitors paid. I feel the same way about pretty much everything… having a new car won’t make me a better driver, and it won’t do any better job of getting me from A to B. New clothes won’t do any better job of keeping me warm and covering me up than the ones I already have. This philosophy will get you a long way.

Distilled Rose has a good post about the cost of making lasagna from scratch. Lasagna is one of my favorite foods, and I always make it myself – the frozen stuff isn’t as good anyway.

I also liked this post from Frugal Homemaker Plus. It led me to another good blog, money saving mom, with a mother who has very similar views to mine when it comes to money and life. Both Frugal Homemaker and Money Saving Mom are saving lots of money, earmarked for specific goals. My husband and I are doing the same thing. We’ve come a long way from the days when we were earning $20,000 a year and barely able to afford our mortgage. But now we’re saving for our son’s education, solar panels, our own retirement, our emergency fund, our HSA, and paying off our mortgage as fast as we can. So we still don’t have any “disposable” income. It’s all accounted for, and will be for quite some time. You can’t judge another person’s financial situation just based on how much money they earn. Some people choose to spend everything they earn, others choose to spend as much as they earn, and some of us choose to spend far less than we earn.

This Wasn’t In The Plan has a great post about ways you can be even more frugal – even if you’re already pretty frugal to begin with. I do a lot of frugal things, but I’m always finding ways to push it just a little bit more. The road to financial success (and indeed, pretty much any success) is paved with very small stones, all lined up in a row. Very few people win the lottery or get a huge windfall. Making lots of little decisions every day that stretch your income and lower your costs is a much more reliable way to go about getting ahead.

Stop the Ride has a post called Maybe I’m Just Cheap – about not wasting food. My husband will never let food go to waste. If we’re eating out with family and someone doesn’t finish their meal, he’ll take the rest in a to-go box (he only does this with family – don’t worry, he’s not taking half eaten meals home from a business lunch). We eat leftovers a lot, and pretty much the only thing that goes in our compost bucket is inedible food scraps. Not partially eaten meals. And if he had seen three whole pizzas about to go in the trash, he’d have protested too.

Comments

My husband and I try not to throw anything out that we can use in a recipe somehow. For example, last Sunday we made a meal that used San Marzano tomatoes (heavenly) and jarred sun-dried tomatoes. The San Marzano tomato juice was delicious, so we saved it to use in the water when we make Spanish rice. We saved the oil from the sun-dried tomatoes to use in the hummus I’m making today.

Not too long ago, I would have thrown all of that out without thinking, but now we try to find a use for everything.